If you find the title a bit ominous, rest assured that even the best lead generation companies do not always meet the expectations of their clients due to factors outside their control. They are however well within your own if you know when to act fast enough. Do not think your lead generation services are completely off the hook though as there are also things they can do to help.

When outsourcing for financial sales leads, be careful when your provider tells you to take them or leave them. Any kind of knee-jerk respond is ill-advised at that point. It can be a sign that either your or the other part is being stubborn about the quality of these sales leads. Are you being too picky or are they being too incompetent.

You will find many who say that its never good to limit your financial services lead generation strategy to only those that give your business easy sales. Opting for the easy way out has never been the most honorable option no matter what the era. On the other hand, there is a difference between planning a tactical retreat in your lead generation strategy and one that is simply cowardly.

For businesses, the holiday season seems to be either the best or worst time to generate sales leads. It is not as complicated as it sounds though. It just depends on what market you cater to. And for financial management firms, your sales leads can be generated just in time for Christmas

Big Data. You might have heard or read it somewhere (and most likely, the source was business IT-related). It’s a term that is seeing increased use in all areas of business management from marketing and sales to accounting and manufacturing. However, what does this have to do with financial services and more importantly, what’s the connection to making sales leads?

Well a few months back, Networkworld published a slideshow that might be of some interest to those in the financial services industry:

“When it comes to Big Data, the financial services sector has been somewhat slow on the uptake. Neil Palmer, partner of SunGard Consulting Services’ Advanced Technology Business, explains it as a cautious approach to innovation driven by the heavily regulated nature of the industry. But with data growth becoming a challenge and increasing pressure to bring down operational costs, Big Data is beginning to shape financial services too.”

Notice how the slideshow goes on to describe the rising demands and how it says that Big Data is supposed to meet these demands. If your financial service firm has already understood, then it’s likely you already have (or at least just begun) to incorporate Big Data for your functions.

The question is: Does your client know?

Not just your current clients either, but also the potential ones you’re qualifying and pursuing as financial leads. Going back to the slideshow, there’s a chance that they might understand one or two slides. However, what about the rest?

What you’ll see is the risk posed by Big Data and one of the things it’s supposed to manage: large, and large amounts of information. The problem is that same volume could overload the minds of your prospects and give them an unnecessary headache.

Prior to qualifying your sale leads, your marketing agents should go to the prospects first and ask just what is it that they want to know. Financial services cover a wide array of business functions but the top-most concern for an individual prospect might be a selected few. If not a selected few, they could still rank them all in terms of priority. If you’re going to involve Big Data, you need to prepare for the following questions:

How does this help? – This is one of the most popular questions posed for Big Data gurus. You don’t have to be at that level but it helps to at least have marketing inform sales that the relevance of Big Data is an issue for the prospect.

What helps where? – The slide show demonstrates how Big Data assists in the processes of several functions. But as stated before, these functions can have varying priorities for each, individual prospect. Demonstrate how Big Data aligns to these priorities.

Whether the qualification was done via social media engagement or B2B telemarketing, qualified sales leads should be for the purpose of helping sales teams prepare. Your use of Big Data in your own services may not always ring well with your prospect. That doesn’t mean you should reconsider it but it should mean that you must avoid the dangers of data overload.